


Echoes

by regenderate



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 22:29:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20433503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regenderate/pseuds/regenderate
Summary: The Doctor likes to check in on her friends. It's not always a linear process.(Thirteen Week Day 4: Time)





	Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> thirteen week is thirteen/rose's city now

1.

Rose Tyler is an infant.

The Bad Wolf. One of Earth’s greatest warriors. Small enough to fit in a mixing bowl.

The Doctor watches her through the hospital windows. She’s surrounded by other babies, really only distinguishable by the name written on the bracelet around her wrist and on the paper tacked to her little plastic enclosure.

She likes to check up on her companions.

It’s not always a linear process.

* * *

2.

Rose is four years old. She’s stumbling home from the store with her mum, swallowed by her winter coat. Between the brim of her hat and the top of her scarf, the Doctor, leaning against a wall, can see her eyes— brown and bright and curious.

Little Rose trips. There’s a moment of silence, and then tears. Her mum scoops her up, murmuring comforts, and the Doctor moves away. This is a human experience.

* * *

3.

Rose is nine. She’s playing ball with the boys from the estate. She’s good, full of tricks they don’t expect.

The Doctor’s off to the side. She’s careful to make sure Rose can’t see her— her face is different of course, and Rose doesn’t know her yet, but she wants to be safe, and she doesn’t want to come off as creepy. It’s just that she’s been missing Rose a lot lately, and she’ll do anything for even a moment of seeing her. Even if she’s not quite done yet.

Rose elbows a kid aside to get to the hoop, and the Doctor smiles. She popped in a month ago when Jackie first started letting Rose go down to the games— the argument with the existing players about letting a girl play had been fierce, and only really settled when Rose proved herself on the court. If it weren’t so painful, the Doctor would take joy in seeing Rose’s beginnings, the ways she changed and the ways she didn’t.

The Rose the Doctor knew, she thinks, would have fought the same way. It’s comforting, the confirmation that she did know Rose, and still does, well enough to know how she would argue, which battles she would pick. It’s been a thousand years, and the Doctor still remembers.

* * *

4.

Rose is twelve. She’s stopped playing basketball and joined a gymnastics team; she wears hoop earrings and smudged lipstick. She’s in a shop with her friends, and the Doctor is a few racks over, pretending she cares about any jacket she doesn’t already own.

This Rose puts the Doctor on edge, and she can’t figure out why. Her hair’s up in a high ponytail, longer than it was even when the Doctor met her. It swings back and forth while she talks to her friends, picking up rings and bracelets and putting them back down, muttering about how she’d never be able to afford them, anyway, not even if she saved for months.

After a few minutes, the Doctor figures it out. What unnerves her about twelve-year-old Rose is that twelve-year-old Rose is playing grown-up, but she’s not the same as grown-up Rose. Twelve-year-old Rose hides her face, twelve-year-old Rose shies away from the same boys she played ball with three years ago. Twelve-year-old Rose shoplifts magazines and tries to look like the women in them. Twelve-year-old Rose is hiding her lack of self-confidence under layer after layer of eyeliner, and twelve-year-old Rose has already been told she’s not good enough.

The Doctor leaves the shop somehow sadder than when she entered.

* * *

5.

Rose is sixteen. She’s been living with Jimmy Stone for a month now, and the Doctor’s decided to just drop in once, to make sure she’s all right.

She’s not all right.

She’s more withdrawn than the Doctor’s ever seen her. Working as a waitress, she flinches when the kitchen doors close; the Doctor, watching from a table just out of Rose’s range, turns away, feeling like she’s invading Rose’s privacy.

There’s nothing the Doctor can do. She has to let it happen, let Rose withdraw more and more, until her fight comes back.

(The Doctor is there when the fight comes back, lurking outside their building and listening to Rose yell. Even though she knows Rose’s self-confidence and ability to fight back will only grow, she’s relieved to see evidence.)

* * *

6.

Rose is eighteen. She’s working at the department store the Doctor first saw her in, and the Doctor’s almost surprised how completely dejected she looks, tossing clothes onto racks, giving customers halfhearted advice. She vaguely remembers meeting this Rose, but the memory has been so overshadowed by the person Rose became that the Rose she met is a surprise.

The Doctor can barely stand it. She knows what will happen, she knows who Rose will be in a year’s time, and it’s all she can do not to say anything, to leave Rose alone in her sadness and have faith in her knowledge of what will happen/what’s already happened.  
She lingers a moment longer, then leaves the shop.

* * *

7.

This one is the most dangerous.

The Doctor is attending the 2012 Olympics one more time.

She’s pressed into the crowd, waiting for the torch-bearer go by. There’s been a bit of confusion and chaos, but of course the Doctor knew about those beforehand, and so wasn’t affected by them; what she’s affected by is this: Rose Tyler pushing past her with cupped hands, Rose’s smile, Rose saying, “Feel the love,” before she launches a ship into the torch.

The torch flares up, but the Doctor is looking at Rose, how self-assured she is, how capable, with her hair shorter now and tied back, looking exactly like herself.

She doesn’t feel the kind of communal, buoyant love that Rose was trying to channel.

What she does feel is a deep, empty love, mixed with grief and sadness and anger.

It’s been a thousand years. It shouldn’t matter.

It does matter.

She still feels Rose's love.

**Author's Note:**

> as always... check out thirteenfanzine on tumblr and twitter, submit your pieces, do the prompt week, etc etc


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